New Blog

As you'll have seen from the previous post, I've more or less shut up shop here at Intermittently Rational.  Fortunately (and completely unexpectedly), the mental health stuff isn't such a day to day problem for me anymore and as a result I have a significantly reduced urge to blog primarily about it - it no longer fits.  However, I like having a blog, so I decided to set up a new one.

Now, more than a month later, I've finally actually done it!  Not much there yet, but there will be . . .

If you've been reading Intermittently Rational and would like to see my new blog, send me an email and I'll send you the address.  It would, of course, be simpler to just put a link in this post but I want to keep the two blogs separate and putting up a link to the new one would, well, link them. 

Cheers!

Hello Out There

I've been done with my degree for a little more than a month now and while I have been reading everyone else's blogs, I haven't written anything myself.  This is because I am planning to bring this blog to an end.  I'm going to be cleaning it up over the next week or so and I plan to leave the blog itself up for now, anyway. 

I started Intermittently Rational almost two years ago when I was trying to finish my undergraduate degree and I was still in the middle of making a recovery from a very bad episode of depression.  I put the emphasis on my experiences as a student with mental disorder.  Now, many months later on, I seem to have recovered from mental disorder and it doesn't seem like it's going to come back anytime soon.  I haven't been cured, mind: I take my lamotrigine, I have bad days and mini-mood swings, I'm obsessively careful about keeping stress, late nights and alcohol to a reasonable minimum.  It has, however, remained all sub-clinical and hasn't interfered with me doing what I want and living my life.  I have a mental disorder but I'm not suffering from it anymore.

Because of this, I feel that what I have to offer on a blog doesn't fit into the nature of this blog anymore.  I still have things to say about mental disorder that are - at least in my opinion - interesting and I'm pretty sure that I will occasionally add something on this blog in the future.  I will not, however, be doing so regularly.  I plan to start a new blog (I like having one) with my real name (!) and a broader emphasis over the next month and I plan to continue to use this google account to read and comment on the blogs I've been reading, so I'll still be reachable at this address. 

Starting Intermittently Rational is one of the best decisions I've made.  I cannot thank all of you who have read and commented over the years enough for all the support.  It was a real and tangible help to me as I put my life back together (again).  While I'll miss being here, I hope some of you will come follow my new blog (I'll send out an e-mail with the address once I have one) and whatever happens, I'll still be following. 

Thank You!

I'm now a fully dissertated former grad student.  While I'm really looking forward to sleeping for more than two hours at a time tonight, I'm really not happy that my year is over.  If I thought I could actually get away with living in the common room in the philosophy building - as I not infrequently threaten to do - then I would.  There are shower facilities and a kitchen in there, after all; I could make it work.

I'm really pleased with myself for getting my dissertation done and turned in.  It was a fascinating project to work on and hopefully it turned out well.  As I know I've said before, I was writing about mental health policy and legislation and I want to thank everyone who has ever commented on this blog and everyone who writes the blogs I read - I couldn't have done it without you.  I've been keeping this blog for going on two years now and the ongoing conversation has been a great help not only in crafting my dissertation but also in deepening and elucidating my own personal understanding of what mental disorder is and who I am.  Not the least important, I have enjoyed it! 

The Bit I Forgot

I remembered what the third thing was!  (please see previous post) 


I heard of what seemed to me a rather good insomnia suggestion that I had never heard before.  Happily, I'm not suffering much from that particular problem these days but I'm ever on the alert for new ways to deal with it when it does arise.  True, the fact that I'm typing this at 12.22am might seem to belie this assertion but I'm staying up all night on purpose, which is dangerous, I know, but I haven't done it in an age and I don't want to stop working when I am so damn close to being done.  The end is tantalisingly close and I really, really childishly want to be the next person to put 'dissertation finished' as a facebook status update.  I know how silly that is.  I'm also terrified that I won't finish in time - I've been having a horrible time trying to work for the past two weeks and I really want it to end.  Tangential self-excusing over now.


The suggestion is this: if you cannot sleep and you know you're not going to sleep, try to spend some of your time meditating.  The meditation is not meant to relax you so that you can then go to sleep but rather as an obviously inadequate sleep substitute that is clearly a hell of a lot better than pacing, poking around on the internets or watching television.  That way, you can have some rest even if you can't have sleep.


Whilst it's not a viable option for all and any kind of sleepless night, it really appealed to me as a positive option.  I like that it is something that is not intended to lead to sleep but rather to ameliorate sleeplessness.  It's perfectly possible to follow all of the good, long term habits for sleep and still not be able to sleep: I'm pleased to now have sleep-loss amelioration suggestion.

Extra Thoughts and Some Music

I've got what feels like less than enough time to finish my dissertation and so my brain has, naturally enough, kicked into overdrive.  As a result, I have a few things that keep floating up to the surface of my consciousness so I'm skimming them off here in the hope that that will lay them to temporary rest.

1)  I've often thought about the problem of being in a relationship and having a mental disorder.  I've written about it before, a couple of times.  Today, however, I started thinking about it in a different way.  I've been thinking about it only in terms of the way I feel as though I were "damaged goods": it's a cruel phrase, but it's the one lodged in my subconscious mind.  If one looks at it more broadly and with fewer innappropriate moralistic overtones, then on can reframe it as a relationship (potentially) between a neurotypical person and a non-neurotypical person.  It seems to me that this correctly captures the extra effort required with the additional advantage of making it perspicuous that the effort flows both ways.  The statistical likelihood is that if I (a non-neurotypical person) end up in a relationship, that relationship will be with a neurotypical person because there are a lot more neurotypical persons than non-neurotypical persons.  Thus, the expectation that I will have to make extra effort to accommodate a person whose neurological architecture is significantly different from mine is a strong expectation.  I do no, however, consider that the effort is too costly.  It seems fine and acceptable to me.  Whenever I have hitherto considered it from the other side, however, it has often felt like it would be asking too much of any person to bear the burden of accommodation for my non-typical neural architecture.  The effort, however, that that hypthetical neurotypical person would have to make is theoretically no greater than any effort I will have to make; it is just statistically less likely that any given individual neurotypical person would have to make that effort in any given relationship.  Thus, I can now see that I have been falling for an informal fallacy all these years!  I'm going to try to stop worrying about it, or at least to acknowledge the effort I would have to make as being equally important.  Liberating.

2)  Learning the music for a Handel oratorio, while a joyful and worthwhile end in itself, is not actually commensurate with writing a dissertation.  Must put mp3 player away now.

3)  There was another one but now I can't remember what it is.  Distracted even in my distractions.  Damn!  That's some distracted!  Oh well.

Here's some Handel for your delectation:



And some silly Handel with dancing by the ever-wonderful Mark Morris Dance Group:



Almost done!  Can't wait!  Day in bed with chocolate, Carson McCullers novel and Handel score coming up.  Then, my 30th birthday party.  How did I get this old?  Last time I checked I was still 25.

Over-Educated Undead

I think grad school might be a species of zombie. 

1) If one is in grad school, one must write a dissertation.
2) Dissertations will eventually take over your inner running commentary; you will eventually realise that you are losing your ability to think about non-dissertation things and your ability to make complete sentences out loud.  Groaning constitutes a large part of your discourse.
3) Monomania, the inability to make complete sentences and the increase of groaning are all indicators that one's brain is being eaten.
4)If it is a thing that eats brains, it is a zombie.
5) Dissertations are brain eating things. 2, 3 Hypothetical Syllogism
6) Grad school is a brain eating thing. 1, 5 Hypothetical Syllogism
_________________________________________
Therefore, Grad school is a species of zombie.  6, 4 Hypothetical Syllogism

Proof: I love logic.  Brain eating ceases 5pm 1 September.  Wish me luck!

Pointless Spillover from Facebook

The plural of the noun 'fly' is 'flies'.

The verb 'fly' conjugates as follows:

I fly                     We fly
You fly               You fly
He/She/It flies     They fly

It is never, under any circumstances, spelled 'flys' or 'flyes'.

I want to put this in my status update so badly but I can't do it without hurting people's feelings.  Instead, I'm putting it up here.  Unbelievably, three different people have spelled either of the two incorrectly in their status updates over the past 72 hours.  What iz the world coming 2? 

Thanks for your patience with my orthography-bile! 

Stress and Moodiness

I've been sort-of hard at work on my dissertation this week and last; sort-of hard at the socialising, too.  We have a draft due on Friday and I'm having a hard time getting the words onto paper. 

Unfortunately, I often have writer's block when it comes to submitting work to be graded.  This is still a relatively new problem for me.  In 2006, I had what can only be called (pathetic as this sounds) a traumatic grading experience.  It was the final paper for a class I had been doing very well in.  The professor who had previously been quite supportive and quite enthusiastic about the work I had done really did not like my final paper.  I, on the assumption that she would like it as much as the rest of my work, was careless about picking up the draft from her in a timely fashion.  It was the end of the semester, which is always a very busy time, and so I didn't get it back from her until about six hours before our exam period, during which she had decided we would present and discuss our papers instead of sitting an exam.  Clearly, this was not the best decision on my part but I do think that I was reasonably justified in expecting that, on the whole, any comments would be largely positive.  What I got instead was a barrage of mixed justified criticism and emotional hogwash.  It's not on to accuse someone of being species-ist in a ten page paper; it is acceptable to say that soemthing is too much of an assertion and not enough of an argument. 

The difficulty for me was that the argument and the idea behind the paper are objectively good.  I have had many good discussions about it, I have even had that very same paper accepted for a conference.  That class was the first class I had ever had with that particular professor and over the years I learned more about her.  I learned that she (being an arch second-wave feminist) really hates logic and thinks that it can only ever be used to oppress people.  My paper was based around a deductive logical argument and contained the word logic in the title.  I have learned, particularly from hearing more of her own work, that she is very invested in essential notions about sex and gender and really believes that women (have to) do philosophy in a significantly different way because they are women.  My paper was intended to be critical and possibly destructive about essentialist notions of sex and gender.  Knowing more about the way she looks at the world, I can see that she must have experienced that paper as a personal attack, designed to oppress her, written by a female student who obviously was a sex traitor for using logic and saying that women are not necessarily different from men.  From that point of view, it would have been philosophically coherent for her to react emotionally to my paper, rather than to try to argue against it or be objective about the merits of its content.

I am quite logically convinced that she is in the wrong, that the paper - while far from perfect - is not the fundamentally flawed piece of drivel she tried to make it out to be.  However, I only know this and it is hard to convince myself that she was wrong on the level of psychological belief or felt truth.  Thus, I continue to have writer's block and it continues to make life hard for me from time to time.  Whatever the merits of my paper, it was wrong and unprofessional of her to attack me in that way; I understand now that she felt that I had attacked her and that she was responding in kind BUT I didn't attack her, I attacked an idea and she knows it.  She just reacted in an ideological way to what I was saying.  She reacted in a way that I believe is a betrayal of the social contract between a teacher and a student, and a way that is an unhelpful disruption of the norms, ethos and mores of a university.  If she's that committed to that particular variety of second-wave feminism, then what is she doing teaching at a university?  They're definitely and demonstrably tools of male oppression in much the same way as logic!  She has a right to her beliefs about the world and the right to act on them and I have a corresponding duty to respect that; however, I have a right to my beliefs about the world and a right to act on them and she has a corresponding duty to respect that!

The whole experience has had some benefit.  It really deepened my understanding of how to practise philosophy and how to read another person's work and how to disagree and why philosophers disagree with one another in the way that they do (i.e. respectfully).  I am still having a hard time, however, with the writer's block.  It has gotten much, much better over the years - so much better.  I'm sure it will continue to get easier.  It is not, however, gone.  When a deadline gets close, I experience a lot of negative stress.  It's the kind of stress that comes tinged with self-loathing and self-harm ideation and this makes it very hard for me to work.

On a year to year basis (though not necessarily on a day to day one), I have been on an upward trajectory since I was in hospital a little more than three years ago.  Having an accurate diagnosis has helped me to understand what to look for symptom-wise and all that looking has helped me become increasingly familiar and accurate in understanding what's going on with me by what I'm thinking and what I feel, both emotionally and physiologically.  This familiarity in turn has given me an increased ability to look after myself well and effectively.  I have learned some ways to help myself get over or past various psychological stumbling blocks and how to deal with the stubborn symptoms that are really not under my control.  I'm far from perfect at it - the logical possibility of my ever being perfect at it is close to zero - but I'm much better than random and much better than I used to be.  This writer's block seems to be one of those things that I have some control over - limited control but susceptible to improvement. 

This week, the stress of writing through the self-loathing is pushing me towards the serious kind of moodiness.  It will be okay - it will be over soon and then it will be as though it never happened, or so I keep telling myself.  Nevertheless, I'll get to go through it again but a bit worse at the end of next month when the final paper is due and I'm going to be job hunting between now and then, which is usually a stressful and rather discouraging activity.  I'm also going back to visit the family for a week and this means long haul flying and jet lag which has, historically, set me off mood-wise.  That's an unusual number of risk factors and it worries me a bit.


Anyhow, I'm really curious as to what other people do to cope with things like this, especially writer's block.  I would really like to get rid of it.  Even if it isn't something you've done but rather something that happened, I would be very appreciative if you'd tell me about it.  What I've been able to do so far specifically for the writer's block is to just carry on writing through the teeth of it, look back on and analyse what happened and what it was that upset me and why it might have happened, seeking other people's opinions on the work (e.g. entering it for and presenting it at a conference) and letting time pass.  And I started this blog - really.  It seemed like having another reason to write and a different audience might help, as it has indeed done. 

This isn't the best post I've ever written - in fact, I suspect it's a bit boring; sorry about that - but this is a subject much on my mind at the moment.  Back to the word-arranging grind, now.

Stuck on Repeat

Life is the thing that repeats itself.  I think that I have been broken, blown and burned but there I am, doing the exact same thing over again but thinking it to be different until it turns out not to be, again.  And again, and again.

Have I ever mentioned that women are confusing?  And that they distract one from one's work?  Bother.

I hate the month of July.

Hurray

I have been in a spectacularly cheerful mood ever since exams have ended.  I have, however, been worrying about the proposed ConDemolition government immigration cap.  It seemed highly possible that they would eliminate Tier IV conversion visas, which is the next one I need to get, and that I'd have to go back to America, which I really don't want to do.  Yesterday afternoon I was in the highly surreal position of attending a party in Parliament while the debates about non-EU immigration were going on.  There are little television screens in every room in Parliament, one green, one red, which tell you what's being debated in the Commons and Lords, respectively.  The whole time I was there trying to overcome my shyness and talk to people I don't know in order to try to find a job, I would catch out of the corner of my eye that Theresa May was speaking and that seven minutes of the debate were left.  It was unbelievable.

However, this morning, I read in the Guardian that students staying on to work after finishing a degree from a British university are exempt from the cap and that the old rules continue to apply!  Thank God!  I really don't know what I would have done otherwise.

No More Exams!

I cannot tell you how good it feels to be done with exams! I haven't been in this good a mood for ages. It really is a good mood, too, not a scary good mood.

I took all the rest of last week off from pretty much everything. I slept (a lot) and ate real food and took some walks in the sun and read a bunch of novels and called friends in the States and went to some parties and just generally enjoyed myself. The fun has continued into this week - I'm off to Oxbridge later on and have a picnic and a garden party coming up - but I'm back at work on the dissertation.

I have been learning a lot about mental disorder from my dissertation research. I'm actually really quite excited about it - so much so, that I have decided to subject all of you to the best bits of it. My aim, for the next month or so, is to put up one or two posts a week on the things I've found out or that I'm thinking about that I consider to be the most interesting. Hopefully, this will have the double effect of preserving this blog from a slow death and keeping me going in my work.

I hope that everyone's having a good month!

Gaudeamus Igitur

Exams are over! I'm now allowed to think about whatever I want and read whatever I want and do things that are not studying! Woohoo!

I may even write a real post before too long...

Argh!

Exams - Tories - Queue-bargers - Argh!

That is all. Just needed to get that off my chest.

Exams

All is quiet on the Intermittently Rational front at the moment because I am revising for exams! It's horrible and wonderful and I can't wait for it to be over. My first one is on the seventh of June and the last is on the fourteenth. Wish me luck!

Thanks for being patient with the long silence. It started when my computer broke (horrible! inconvenient! expensive!) and by the time I had it back, study season had started in earnest. Things will go back to normal(er) on the fifteenth.

Research Tidbit #1

I am in the thick of secondary dissertation research. We have a initial ten or so pages due on Friday, which I have just started writing because I am a very organised person. Yes.

I found a new article yesterday that was a research report into a sociological study (very well set up) that was initiated to determine what the actual deficit in ability to give informed consent was for persons hospitalised for mental disorder. I'm not going to go into the results just now because I want to keep this brief but in reading the study I found out something new to me that apparently is common to depressed persons. That is, a distinct deficit in capacity to make decisions successfully. As I was reading their description of what this meant, I did absolutely recognise myself.

According to the study, depressed persons typically were less able to communicate a decision and once a decision had been communicated, they were much more likely to experience distress or regret - often on the presumption that the decision must have been the wrong one. I do this all the time. I had assumed that it was just a part of my character - I still tend largely to think it is - but it is interesting to see that it is a characteristic correlated with depression. I know that it gets worse when I'm depressed but as almost everything seems to get worse when I'm depressed I didn't think of it as having any special relation.

This has, of course, started me wondering whether a diminished capacity to make and communicate decisions is also a reverse predictor. That is, if depression predicts a diminished capacity to make and communicate decisions, does a diminished capacity to make and communicate decisions predict depression? Obviously, that couldn't ever be a single predictor of depression - I can think of other things it might predict - but I wonder whether it might constitute another way to confirm or disconfirm a diagnosis of depression or perhaps be a good indicator of severity.

What do you all think? Does this reflect your experience? Had you heard about it before?

For My Mild Homesickness...

...and your general amusement.

I'm having a mild and rather enjoyable case of homesickness for Asheville, my former abode, amidst all this politicking and policy-wonking. Looking at the video I took of Obama speaking in Asheville has reminded me of another political event of the same month: the visitation of Sarah Palin.

Asheville, being the dear, odd place that it is, has for many years been home to a group of people who like to get together every month or so for Zombie Walk. It is what it sounds like: they dress up as zombies and stumble around downtown groaning at passersby for no particular reason other than that they want to and they can. It's not my cup of tea but it's up there on the list of enjoyable local phenomena.

Anyhow, what day do you suppose the GOP picked to send Palin, by then a liability, to speak in Asheville? That's right: Zombie Walk day, Sunday before Halloween, barely a week before the election. Here's what it looked like:





I didn't have my camera with me that day, unfortunately!

Debates!

I am a bit of politics junkie, so I have been glued to the television tonight. Many people are worried (rightly, in my opinion) about the creeping Americanisation of British politics but, having watched both the chancellor's debate and tonight's Prime Ministerial debate, I don't think one need worry much.

The set up and form of the debate was quite similar to that of the American debates. The content and style were hardly anything like. In America, our major debate points the last time around were Joe the plumber, 'drill, baby, drill', and assorted personal remarks about the past lives of each of the candidates. We are also still debating the legality of abortion, whether same sex couples should be recognised in any way by local, state and federal authorities and whether everyone should have access to healthcare. In Britain, the major debate points were the relative validity of Keynesian economics and the contents of actual policies relevant to actual issues that actually exist, rather than ideological point-scoring.

However, I was disappointed in the quality of the oratory. On the whole, I would say that Britain's politicians are the better speakers. I love to watch parliament, especially question time while C-Span coverage of the House and Senate bore me to tears. It's not that any of them was particularly bad, more that none of them was particularly good. It would be good, before the next election, to consider finding a debate format that would better reflect the oratorical praxis of Great Britain. Then again, I've been a bit spoiled by watching this man speak*:




* I filmed this myself when Obama came to speak in Asheville. The shaky camera work comes courtesy of lithium.

Appropos of Absolutely Nothing

I was looking at facebook this evening when this tryptich of advertisements caught my eye:



Just about sums it up, doesn't it?

For Once, Something Curable

I now know why I've caught every cold around this winter and am always exhausted. It turns out, I'm anaemic!

It has been a long time since I had a medical problem that is both well-understood in its pathology and easily treatable. I'm quite chuffed, really.

As anyone who has been reading this blog will have realised, sleep is a big problem for me. However, for the past three months I have been sleeping ridiculously well and I've had little to no problem falling asleep. The past few weeks have been nine or ten hours a night and the past two have also been accompanied by daytime naps of three hours' duration. Normally for me a daytime nap means irregular and broken sleep for a week.

My fingernails have been displaying a marked propensity to break and I've been dropping things and walking into doors quite a bit more than is normal for me. I had been worried about the coordination issues - tardive dyskenesia sprang immediately to mind, although I know the way that manifests itself is a bit different in reality, as did neurological damage. I read the patient insert leaflets.

What I never read on a patient insert leaflet, however, was that lithium and various of the mood stabilisers have an effect on one's B vitamin levels which in turn has an effect on one's ability to absorb iron which combined with the heavier menstruation associated with such medications can give one an increased chance of anaemia, particularly if a female of child-bearing age. Apparently, this is the case. Spread the word.

I had been very perplexed. It's spring and I have a touch of the mild manias - nothing to write home about - but I've never known mania, however mild, to combine with sleeping 12 hours a day!

In Absentia

So I think I'm a lucky person who abandons (more or less) her blog for a month and comes back to find four new followers: welcome!

There are some comments, too and I will respond to them soon. Thanks, everyone, for reading and commenting even when I'm absent without notice. I have been a cheat, reading everyone else's blogs (mostly on my phone whilst on the bus, now that I've figure out how to do that) and not making anything to read for a month. I didn't realise it had been that long!